Celebrated slice-of-lifer and avid TwittererSusan Orlean lives in Columbia County with four chickens. Or, rather, she did. On Sunday she set the creatures loose for a little constitutional. Now she's complaining about the cremation costs of one dead chicken.

And of course she's Twittering about it, though she doesn't tell us what exactly happened to the fourth chicken, who we're going to call Laroche.

So a sad little story that all played out in some green corner of New York. This probably says something about how we let people go. About how we sometimes lose them forever. About how we hope with abandon and despair that they will someday return to us, whole and alive and uninjured by the bigger world—that mysterious and luring realm that we cannot keep at bay.